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Comment by cientifico | Hacker News Reader

Rails was done by a product guy to solve one need. Most of the "the new rails" challengers are made by engineers.

Rails took a need: creating a blog engine; and make everything needed to have the simplest and most understandable way of doing it. Going through that example was like: -"Ahh makes sense.". Features were secondary and the focus was on the solution. It was about solving one specific use case and grow from there.

So far, any framework I saw that claims to be the new rails, is speaking about features and the million things you can do.

It feels like Rails was done by a product guy, and all alternatives were done by engineers.

From reading the article, remix feels like the best way to deploy to edge. An engineering problem. Not a user one.

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I very much agree. The fact that Rails (`master/main` branch even) is used unmodified by Basecamp, Shopify, and GitHub (and maybe GitLab), and features are added by extracting implementation from running apps, Rails just comes from and developed by very different needs than Remix in this example.

Not Gitlab, they stick to stable branch and upgrade tends to be latest version minus one. Although I do hope they hop on to the train.

Using actual stable branches is still a very good sign. Instagram forked their own Django and Python. Stable Django is used by some companies too, though (Sentry for example).

> So far, any framework I saw that claims to be the new rails, is speaking about features and the million things you can do.

I don’t think Remix themselves are claiming to be the new Rails.

Rails is an open source sourftware with hundreds if not thousands of contributors, its at version 7 now, if you think it's been "written by a product guy" you don't know what you're saying.

I think he was referring to the genesis of Rails, not the evolved product.

Rails was originally created for, most intents and purposes, of building Basecamp and solving Basecamp problems. That's why Rails is good at building things that are similar to Basecamp and adjacent use cases.

Modern Rails has been adapted to modern standards and trends but is still a "basecamp framework", with some additions to also be a "hey.com framework".

Basecamp is a small company, intentionally, so it makes sense that DHH is more of a "product guy", or at least has more of a product sense than your typically insulated enterprise engineer.

IIRC Rails was actually extracted from Basecamp. The "DHH makes a blog" video was the hello world demo that made Rails famous.

I used to work for Highrise (after it spun out from Basecamp), and if you looked through the early commits, there was definitely some functionality that were ancestors of Rails features.

And DHH is a software engineer. The grandparent comment sounds like he isn't.

He's a software engineer with a business background (his degree is from Copenhagen Business School), who thinks about problems both ways.

Purely anecdotally, but there's a weird thing with software engineering and architecture where it's heavily linguistic compared to older engineering disciplines.

For whatever reason there doesn't seem to be a huge overlap between people drawn to traditional engineering and linguistics.

I've repeatedly observed that some people have an affinity for the hardware (and are closer in disposition to engineers in other disciplines), some for the software, and only a smaller subset really enjoys both.

So much of what makes api's, languages and complex sytems easy to reason about are their linguistic ergonomics.

It's just a feeling but I hold the position that there is still a lot of room for improvement in language ergonomics and density, and that we're still closer to latin than english in both linguistic efficiency & developer tools.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/whats_the_most...

I think DHH (and rails by extension) is an engineer with strong linguistic affinity biased towards financial utility. So it's no wonder that first blog video blew so many minds.

DHH is a business person that solves problems, who just happens to know how to write code :)

DHH is a software writer :)

This isn’t how I see it really. It doesn’t make sense to label DHH as just a product guy. He is an engineer that designed a software framework.

The fact that all alternatives you see are done by engineers doesn’t feel that shocking because, well, all software frameworks require them to be built by software engineers.

Some are lucky to have a good sense of customer/user needs and the desire to build products too. Frameworks like Remix are thinking about balancing good UX, DX an what the tech of today can today and not simply solving engineering problems.

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